Brrrr…eight inches of snow to shovel off the driveway yesterday and sore arms today.
This morning, I woke up an hour ago to -6 Fahrenheit and it’s already climbed down to -8 (windchill -24) and it’s a gonna hang out at these subzero temps for a couple days.
So what’s a person to do on their week off when it’s like this? Using the oven to make meals, sipping hot drinks, working a jigsaw puzzle (in real life), and reading. My favorite kind of week off in winter.
These are most recent two books I’ve read.
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
The first is Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, a science fiction novella, 90 pages long.
Binti is a 16-year-old woman of an esteemed desert family. We’re in action immediately as, in secret, she leaves on a transporter to attend a prestigious university. When she boards a shuttle, she makes her way through security and people’s stares to get onto the living ship. She’s a harmonizer through mathematics. This story is a quick and fascinating read.
Okorafor is an Igbo (Nigerian) American. She’s won many awards for her short stories and young adult books. Binti won both the 2016 Nebula award and the 2016 Hugo award. Binti is now a series.
Well-Read Black Girl, edited by Glory Edim
The second book is an anthology of short stories and memoirs. Well-Read Black Girl, edited by Glory Edim, founder of the Well-Read Black Girl club based in Brooklyn, New York. Authors in this anthology include: Tayari Jones, Rebecca Walker, N.K. Jemisin, Jacqueline Woodson, and many others.
Each section is divided with recommended selections of further readings: classic novels, black feminism, black girlhood and friendship, science fiction and fantasy, plays, and poetry, all written by black women.
The purpose of this book:
find words for their own lived experience
slip on the skins of world that are familiar
see interpretations of the world as it was
envision the world as it could become.
As Edim writes on her website:
Our goal is to showcase the universality of Black women through literature. Through reading our community addresses racial inequity in publishing and pays homage to the literary legacies of Black women writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou.
Happy reading!